I made some new textures for my TOS Enterprise model. When I first built the ship, I didn’t want to do any paneling or weathering on the textures. Well, I’ve changed my stance on that and I’ve done both paneling and weathering. The paneling is subtle, it’s only in the specular channel and I used small variations in shades of gray to make it subtle. The weathering, on the other hand, is more prominent. It’s in both the color and specular maps. I didn’t bother trying to recreate the weathering on the 11-foot model, instead I just did my own thing. I also tweaked my bussard collectors further and finally got them looking how I want them to look. After that was done, I decided to render some images.
I originally planned to do more than two images, but I wound up spending some time converting some of my older models to Lightwave 2018. This basically entails changing from the old style materials to Principled BSDF materials. Principled BSDF works much better with the rendering engine in Lightwave 2018. Unfortunately, when I change the materials, I have to reapply my textures. And, for materials where I didn’t UV unwrap the objects, I have to redo the mapping as well. So, it takes some time, to say the least. But, it was worthwhile as I was able to use my Starbase and Reliant-style ship for the second image.
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Thanks.
Thanks Hunter. Yeah, I don't like that in your face paneling. In my opinion, it should disappear under certain lighting conditions.
Anyway - incredible work.
There's a couple sceenies showing the material setup. It's really a pretty simple node setup. A lot of the subtlety is in the specular map itself. The color variation in the panels is pretty subtle, which is what sets the specular levels. The roughness and metallic settings also make a difference, as they determine how the light is distributed along the object.
I figure out a lot of stuff through trial and error. If I can help people skip a few steps that I had to take, I'm all for it. I'm sure that most people on here would do the same for me or at least pay it forward.
Indeed, for sure.
I do the same thing.